can anyone explain to me why the new superconductor news is so exciting? I don't often read about or deal with the physical sciences so I'm a bit clueless there.
I gather this is very Cool and Exciting but I don't fundamentally appreciate why
stolen from Alex Kaplan on twitter
Today might have seen the biggest physics discovery of my lifetime. I don't think people fully grasp the implications of an ambient temperature / pressure superconductor. Here's how it could totally change our lives.
- 100 billion kWh of electricity are wasted on transmission losses each year in the US alone. That's equivalent to 3 of our largest nuclear reactors running 24/7. Superconductivity enables lossless electricity transmission at high voltages and currents.
- According to the authors, the [superconducting] LK-99 material can be prepared in about 34 hrs with extremely basic lab equipment (a mortar & pestle, basic vacuum, and furnace). These results could replicate within days-weeks.
[If you're curious, here's the recipe]

- Nuclear fusion reactors rely on superconductors for plasma confinement. Modern designs use RBCO/YBCO superconductors cooled with LN2 or Liquid He, creating a huge temperature gradient and challenging operation. Ambient superconductors enable a whole host of new reactor designs.
- Quantum computers use superconductors to preserve coherence in qubits. Small changes in temperature and pressure can cause the entire QC to fail during operation. Imagine a room temperature quantum computer on your desktop - now possible.
- Superconductors might be the best batteries out there. Simply inject a current and keep it in the coil until you need it. Previously, too costly to maintain. Now, totally feasible.
- Your iPhone [will overheat slower] when playing subway surfer with a youtube video in the corner anymore! [More] efficient computer chips [including CPUs, GPUs, RAM etc.] will have 0 resistive losses [and therefore a bit lower power consumption] during operation with superconductors. [Correction: This will make them a bit more effective, but they will still consume a lot of power, at least for now.]
- And, the common ones: super-cheap MRI machines, MagLev trains everywhere, and a super efficient electric grid. Basically, this:

- I cannot contain my excitement. It feels like January of 2020 with a huge wave coming that no one realizes yet, but in a much better way. What a time to be alive!! Check out the original paper:
[Do note that whether this is legit is still unclear, so take this with a grain of salt, but if we really get room-temperature superconductors this is absolutely huge.]
yup, that image sums it up. you can actually do all of that with the new superconductor, assuming it's not a hoax.
I’ve been telling everyone I know - If this is real, if this pans out, within years we’re going to see a leap in technology that’ll make the internet look like a blip.
This, if reproducible, is the single largest scientific discovery in all our lifetimes.
I have (admittedly, mostly unused) degrees in Electrical Engineering and Material Science, and I'm skeptical that this is the Utopia Button that everyone claims it is. When you're selecting a new material for an application, conductivity is only one of several factors you have to consider:
- Cost
- Ductility
- Mechanical Strength
- Resistance to Corrosion
- Weight
I'm just going to go down the line of the post above and give my own assessment, given my (admittedly not strong) background in the fields in question.
- Electricity transmission - The conductor currently used in most transmission lines is an alloy of aluminum, nickel, and cobalt. It's not chosen for its conductivity, it's chosen because it's relatively cheap and easy to draw into long tubes (power lines are hollow, due to an effect known as skin transmission) and it has enough tensile strength to hold itself up and not break due to thermal expansion or light winds. Can this new superconductor do that? I don't know, that study hasn't been done yet.
- Ease of construction - This seems like a result that's easy enough to replicate and scale, and the materials aren't exotic. That's a point in its favor.
- Nuclear fusion - Fusion is absolutely not my field, but when people talk about gradients, I get nervous. In this case, temperature gradient to what? The inside of the reactor while it's operating? If the reactor runs at 10,000K and your magnets are at 10K, does it really matter all that much if your magnets can operate at 273K instead? It might, not an expert, but this will take time to sort out.
- Quantum Computers - Again, not an expert here. This does seem to be a fantastic use case for this superconductor. But nobody's ever really been able to explain how useful a QC is outside of an academic setting, solving specific problems.
- Power Storage - This is definitely true. I would expect this to dramatically change the industries where batteries are used, especially cellphones and EVs, assuming that the superconductor doesn't break when you drop your phone and doesn't catch fire in a car crash (although tesla has proven that's not a requirement). But it still comes down to cost, weight, ease of manufacture, etc. And it will take time.)
- Computer chips - Computer chips are made from silicon, which is a semiconductor. The reason that the billions of transistors in your phone work is because they don't conduct electricity all the time. A superconductor, by definition, can't do that. Now, there is also some resistance in the gold used in chips, and you could see some gains by replacing gold with superconductor, but that's assuming that you can melt and flow this material exactly like gold and I don't know if you can.
- MRI machines - Should work, and would save on liquid helium, making them cheaper to run, and hopefully cheaper to build. This would be great.
- Maglev trains - Again, I'm skeptical. The magnetic locking of a superconductor is enough to hold itself up, but you can move it with your hand, at least in the demonstration linked above. That means it will move in response to an outside force. What happens when a 3-ton train is placed atop one of these things? I don't think it's a dealbreaker, just that it will require some clever engineering.
Out of all the things listed, I would rate a couple as industry killing improvements, a couple as totally unfeasible, and everything else somewhere in the middle. Still not bad, but we are not getting the picture up above from just this one material.

